Grieving Time: the Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media

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Grieving Time: The Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media

Anna Cohen

Senior Honors Thesis

The Department of American Studies,

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

May 5, 2021

Approved:

______

Patricia Sawin (Thesis Advisor)

Department of American Studies

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Antonia Randolph

Department of American Studies

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Grabrielle Berlinger

Department of American Studies ii

Abstract

Anna M. Cohen: Grieving Time: The Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media (Under the Direction of Dr. Patricia Sawin)

This thesis engages with Jack Santino’s research on physical shrines and Kay Turner’s

“September 11: The Burden of the Ephemeral” as well as other theories surrounding systemic racism and marginalization. Grieving Time: The Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media seeks to analyze the different pieces of virtual shrines on social media and their uses in the broader folkloric studies of ritual, decentralized healing, and collective trauma. More specifically, this thesis aims to explain postings on Twitter to create an assemblage that address grief after instances of racialized violence. This thesis will also address Kay Turner’s argument about the role of physical shrines and how they guide those left behind after a sudden unexpected death to a stage of acceptance. I am arguing that due to the nature of systemic racism having no clear end on its stronghold in American society, virtual shrines on social media’s role is to help maintain a constant state of grief rather than deliver those left behind after a racial killing to a stage of acceptance.

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Introduction

Figure 1: A Tweet by User @Jaden responding to the protests after the murder of George Floyd.

Public Memorials: What They Are and Where to Find Them

On March 13, 2020, a group of Louisville, Kentucky law enforcement officers entered

Breonna Taylor’s home using a “no-knock” warrant. The police officers thought Taylor had been receiving packages containing drugs on behalf of her ex-boyfriend and therefore went to search her home. As the police officers entered the apartment, Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s then boyfriend, shot a legal firearm at the cops thinking they were intruders breaking into the apartment. This caused cops to return fire, with five bullets hitting and killing Breonna Taylor a few short months before her 27th birthday. The officers, including Brett Hankinson, Detective

Myles Cosgrove, and Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, left Taylor’s apartment without finding any drugs on the premises (Oppel Jr, Taylor, Bogel-Burroughs, 2020).

Two months after the killing of Breonna Taylor, police officers responded to a report that

George Floyd had attempted to use a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store in Minneapolis.

Though the convenience store employee felt sure that Floyd did not know the bill was counterfeit, the cops still took an aggressive approach while arresting Floyd (Chappell, 2021).

Though the exact time length of time is under dispute, video recordings shared on social media depict officer Derek Chauvin putting his knee on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes during his arrest. Floyd consequently died due to what many critics call Chauvin’s excessive use of force while attempting to restrain him (Hill, Tiefenthäler, Triebert, et al., 2020).

Taylor and Floyd’s deaths represent

a broader trend of police brutality against black

people in the United States. White people who

commit violent crimes are more likely to be taken

into police custody alive than black people who

commit minor offences. For instance, on June 15,

2015 white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and

killed nine black churchgoers as they attended a

church service at Mother Emmanuel AME Church.

The cops who arrested Roof took the utmost care

despite his violently killing nine black people less

than a day earlier and even reportedly took him to

Burger King before taking him to jail (Staff

Reports, 2015). A Twitter post by @JRD_FTW99

pointed out the double standard that a white mass

shooter was treated with dignity and respect, while

Figure 2: A Twitter thread discussing the George Floyd was killed after an altercation over a double standard in treatment during George Floyd and Dylann Roof's arrests. fake $20 bill (@JRD_FTW99, 2020). I argue that responses like @JRD_FTW99’s, and many other postings on Twitter that grieved the deaths of

Breonna Taylor and George Floyd created virtual shrines that both brought limited comfort to those appalled by their treatment by police and criticized the system of white supremacy that led to their deaths.1

Current scholarship surrounding public shrines mostly considers these memorials as physical enactments of grief. Much of the research on public memorials depicts them as being physical shrines that the public can create using different types of ephemeral objects such as flowers, candles, posters, stuffed animals, and food. Many of the shrines with which the current literature engages were located at the sites of the unexpected deaths they sought to address. Due to the emergence of social media, however, the performance of grief can now also manifest itself in a virtual realm. In this thesis I seek to add more nuance to the arguments on what a shrine is and is not by analyzing the creation of spontaneous shrines through the social media platform

Twitter in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police in 2020.Twitter is a social media platform that was formed by current CEO Jack Dorsey as well as Evan

Williams, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone on March 21, 2006. In a 2019 study reviewing Twitter’s demographics of users within the United States, about 50% of users were male and 50% were female. Most of Twitter’s users were between the ages of 30-49, with the 18-29 and 50-64 age groups trailing close behind. Finally, the study also calculated that about 10% of the most popular Twitter accounts created 80% of the content circulated among adult Twitter users in the

United States (Wojcik, Hughes, 2020)

1 I like many others around the world found myself glued to social media after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. While I did not regularly post on social media during this time. I did, however, spend a lot of time reading other people’s posts about systemic racism and police brutality. I also learned about the ways I could use my privileges as a nonblack person to help create a safer country for people of color from social media and incorporated these into my daily interactions with my friends, family members, and colleagues. It is this knowledge that I gained through hours of being an active observer on social media immediately after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, that I use in my analysis of virtual shrines.

These statistics are important to acknowledge because they reflect who is actively participating in shrine making on social media. Since memorials heavily reflect the people that make them, it is important to know which demographics are the most active on Twitter. For instance, the study also mentioned that that about 60% of Twitter’s users were white, 11% black, and 17% were Hispanic or Latino of any race, which means that black people and Latinos are represented on Twitter in rough proportion to their percentages of the United States population—

13.4% and 18.5%, respectively—while whites are underrepresented relative to their 76.3% of the population (US Census Quick Facts, 2019). Also, these statistics represent the limitations of

Twitter to represent the healing rituals of people outside the primary demographic of Twitter users. In other words, one cannot expect the same exact shrines that form on Twitter to form on other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram due to differences in the ages, sex/gender, and race of those who frequent each platform.

Though Twitter users are predominately white and 30-49 and only about 10% of users create a significant portion of media that is circulated on Twitter, I think Twitter is the best platform to examine for this thesis because it creates a space where multiple different people can communicate with each other. Whereas other platforms such as Facebook are primarily restricted content to whoever is on a “friends” list, Twitter has a strong public presence. Tweets on Twitter are often publicly accessible since Twitter is designed to create an environment where people can converse with one another outside of their own social circles. Evidence of this is how news publications use tweets as sources of evidence. In a meeting with my mentor, Dr. Patricia Sawin, she mentioned that Twitter is a good platform to observe because many large publications such as the New York Times and Buzzfeed are beginning to use screenshots of Tweets from various twitter users (Sawin, 2020). Secondly, Twitter has an easier search function to find specific

vii content. For instance, whereas other platforms such as Instagram allow users to search different users’ tags, hashtags, or captions, Twitter’s advanced search function allows a certain time frame to be selected making it easier to find relevant data.

Due to the newness of social media, one can expect there would be limited research on how shrine making has manifested itself in a virtual realm. Though virtual shrine making is a relatively new process, it is still significant to study because it is representative of the grieving process in the contemporary age. As technology becomes increasingly important in society, one can expect that many of the rituals that take place in the physical world are also beginning to develop roots in the virtual one as well. As grieving rituals develop online, using digital forms of ephemera, this presents academia with the new opportunity to study how grieving rituals are adapted to exist on an online platform. More specifically, this provides academia with the chance to see how social media appropriates different elements of in-person shrines to address the need for grieving on the internet.

Secondly, another blind spot in academia due to the relative newness of social media is how internet communities address the grieving period after instances of racialized violence. I define racialized violence as violence committed by a white person against a black person where others perceive that race plays a factor. For instance, due to issues with implicit biases within the police system, in this thesis I will primarily examine social media’s response to cases of police brutality, paying special attention to the grieving processes that occurred after the murders of

Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. I will also make a small comparison the healing rituals that take place after explicitly racist mass killings such as the Charleston shooting to demonstrate the longevity of grief (@ExploreCHS, 2020).

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Memorial shrines that form

after instances of racialized violence

have multiple layers of nuance

because those involved in creating the

shrines understand that these deaths Figure 3: Tweet by @ExploreCHS demonstrates how internet communities can join to create a healing space. occur with enraging regularity.

Whereas memorial shrines that address instances such as 9/11 or a car crash respond to freak accidents that no one could have expected, because of white supremacy’s firmly held grip on

American society, there is a level of expectedness to the murders of black people in the United

States. While the deaths of individual people like Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many other black people in the United States are shocking events, the racist murder of black people occurs regularly enough that members of the black community and their allies are not entirely surprised when police kill another black citizen.

This ability to predict the deaths of black people in the United States is demonstrated in

Jaden Smith’s tweet, using the handle @Jaden, in Figure 1. In this tweet, Jaden quotes an unknown source by saying “’I’m Not Crying Because Of The Tear Gas, I’m Crying Because

They’re Killing Our Brothers And Sisters And They Think It’s Okay.’ #SayTheirNames.”

(@Jaden, 2020) By pluralizing

“Brothers” and “Sisters,” Jaden Smith is

demonstrating that the murders of black

people in the United States is something

that regularly happens to multiple people.

Figure 4: User @kpYES shows that the racist killings of black If the murder of a black person in the people is a continual process that has no clear sign of ending after the killing of Walter Wallace Jr.

United States was a one-time occurrence, then Smith would have used singular brother and sister. Also, Smith’s quoted tweet uses the present participle “Killing,” which demonstrates that racist killings of black people are continuing to happen with no clear sign of ending. This is an important aspect of my thesis because it shows that the grieving period after cases of racialized violence is a continual process. Since there is little attempt to address the issues of white supremacy in American society, these murders will continue to happen until a deep-rooted change occurs in the American public sphere as shown in Figure 3 (@KpYES, 2020).

Other black activists have described the continual grief they experience because of police violence. Mike Africa Jr., survivor of a bombing that police conducted on a black community in

Philadelphia in 1985, spoke out about the inappropriate display of a young victim’s bones. The child’s bones were kept in a cardboard box and used in a video as part of a college course on forensic anthropology without the consent or knowledge of the community involved in the bombing. In an interview, Africa said that the disrespectful handling of the child victim’s bones assured him that his grief and anger will “never [end] and no matter how much time passes” because as soon as he can get close to healing, a new event reminds him of his trauma

(Levenson, 2021). While this article largely discusses Africa’s feelings of grief about the bombing, it also demonstrates that grief felt after racial violence can be a continual process.

Rather than reaching a point of healing, the social media users I examined in my own research displayed similar emotions as Africa. It seemed that after each new event, especially for Black

Twitter users, their grief was added onto rather than their experiencing a new wave of grief after each killing. This grief also manifested itself into other feelings such as anger and rage. Black journalist Charles Blow, who began covering police brutality after the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, writes that he is tired of writing articles about black trauma. The killing of Daunte

Wright served as awakening for Blow’s rage that racial killings continue to happen. Even with all of Blow’s rage, he admits that pain and trauma are still present in him, meaning that even in anger, grief is still present (Blow, 2021).

Shrine and memorial making processes on social media enact protest in ways that current scholarship on spontaneous shrines does not always emphasize. Physical spontaneous shrines like those that have appeared at the sites of car accidents and the buildings attacked on 9/11 do not require a protest function since there is not a deeply rooted systemic issue contributing to these events. However, due to white supremacy’s stronghold in American society, memorials for victims of racist killings often address racism. Current scholarship does address similar instances of using grief as a method of protest, notably the shrines that memorialized the victims of

HIV/AIDS crisis (Santino, 2007, 1) and the shrines at site of violence during the Troubles in

Northern Ireland (Santino, 2004, 369). These shrines, respectively, reflected the LGBT community’s grief after a AID’s related fatality while protesting the systemic issues related to homophobia that led to the deaths of millions in the United States and the Irish Catholic grief at the killing of members of their community by British soldiers and Protestant paramilitaries, In an article arguing that feelings of grief and mourning can be an effective form or protest, similar to responses to police brutality, Douglass Crimp writes that “mourning becomes militancy” similar to the ways that social media users channeled their feelings of grief into their protests against police brutality (Crimp, 1989, 9).

The Argument

My goal in this thesis is to explain the role social media plays in memorial making for victims of racialized murders. Though social media postings are easy to write off as futile since they do not aggressively address white supremacy in the way that in-person protests and court

xi cases do, postings on social media still serve an essential purpose in the grieving process. I seek to analyze the ways social media helps to support the survivors of racial violence or those that are left behind after their loved one is killed in a racist killing as they go through their indefinite grieving process. This need will persist until true systemic change occurs. More specifically, I argue that social media platforms such as Twitter provide people a space to compile media to form online shrines for the victims of racist killings through art, hashtags, and online eulogy postings. While these virtual shrines are representations of grief, due to the repeated nature of systemic racism, they cannot fully address healing because as black people begin to accept the death of one individual, another person is killed, thus starting the grieving process over. Instead,

I argue that these virtual shrines maintain a consistent level of grief while also developing an ethos of anti-racism that serves to call attention to and contest the systems of white supremacy prevalent in the criminal justice system.

Understanding these rituals that occur on social media is significant in addressing the systemic issues that occur in the United States. By acknowledging that there is a deeply rooted issue in the United States that forces Black people’s grieving processes after instances of racist violence into a continual cycle, we are one step closer to addressing this issue of systemic racism and therefore ending the indefinite grieving process.

Literature Review

To formulate this argument, I will draw upon sources relating to communal healing, shrine making, performance, protest, and art. What limited research that does exist on virtual shrines documents them as being ephemeral pieces that communicate grief after a tragic event. In their study of YouTube shrines that memorialized the victims of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, Nathalie Paton and Julien Figeac argue that due to social media’s algorithm’s, digital

xii shrines can only serve their functions as people continue to contribute to them. Paton and Figeac write that after shrines lose their relevance, “The material left behind is simply a trace of the contributors’ intent.” (Paton, Figeac, 2015, 257). In my own research, the shrine elements I observe were only the pieces left behind of the original shrines created after George Floyd and

Breonna Taylor’s deaths. While I could research specific hashtags and key phrases in Twitter’s search bar, the full shrine experience occurred in live Twitter feeds as Twitter algorithms stitched various social media postings together. Like Paton and Figeac, I too base my knowledge of social media shrines on my own interpretation of the shrine makers’ intent.

Folklorist Kay Turner, through her research on 9/11 memorials, argues that ephemeral shrines seek to guide those affected by tragic deaths from a stage of grieving to mourning.

Turner also describes mourning as the process that “enables acknowledgement, then acceptance of unbearable loss” (2009, 168). Since racial violence forces black people to continually address the deaths of victims to racist killing, it is impossible for them really to reach a full stage of mourning even with the aid of ephemeral tweets and hashtags. This creates a new burden for the ephemera, to maintain the continual grieving process that survivors of racial violence experience after each new racial killing.

I will be using the term grief as an umbrella term for all of the relevant emotions that social media users expressed on Twitter after Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s deaths. Grief encompasses many different emotions such as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventual acceptance. The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross model for loss and grief argues that acceptance does not mean that one has fully moved on from a loss, but rather that the person accepts the

“reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognize[s] that this new reality is the permanent reality” (Kübler-Ross, Kessler, 2005, 46). I feel this characterization of acceptance of

xiii loss is different than Kay Turner’s analysis because events like 9/11 do not have a systemic underlying cause. Rather, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were a tragic one-time occurrence. Although the deaths of 9/11 victims shocked their families and much of the world, the fact that they were unforeseen has granted mourners the distance they needed to accept— eventually—the reality that their loved ones are gone. In the case of police brutality and other racial killings that spring from the systemic racism that allows deaths like Breonna Taylor and

George Floyd’s to occur continually, each new death reopens the same wound. While grievers may find acceptance over an individual’s death, it is of course impossible for black people to accept the system of white supremacy that repeatedly and even predictably kills black and other nonwhite people.

Jack Santino’s Spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death further contextualizes physical shrines and their roles in healing. Santino argues that spontaneous shrines “display death in the heart of social life” (Santino, 2006, 13). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was a main way that people could safely interact with others outside of their household. This created an unprecedented dependency on social media for socialization that has not existed in previous years, which explains why the grieving responses on Twitter referencing George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths created vivid examples of virtual shrine making processes.

I draw upon Michael Chwe’s book Rational Ritual to frame my argument that social media is not a useless outlet of grief and protest. Whereas social media is commonly written off as insincere by those who do not understand its ability to serve as a grieving and protest space, social media serves an important function in shrine making. Social media is essential in generating common knowledge—in this case about the shrine-making process—or what Chwe

xiv defines as the “knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of others’ knowledge of others’ knowledge, and so on” (2013, 3). This common knowledge that others are participating in the grieving process on social media are necessary because it creates a sense of communal mindset which is important when navigating the liminality that forms after an instance of racial violence.

This communal mindset led to a communal grieving forming among those who experience racial violence.

Zeynep Tufecki’s book Twitter and Tear Gas argues that Twitter serves an essential role in political shrine making. Tufecki asserts that social media aids in political protests because it connects activists together domestically and internationally. Tufecki writes that “large social movements require the participation of large numbers of people, many of whom may not have much prior political experience” (2017, 13). This quote fits directly with trends on Twitter with the Black Lives Matter Movement because Twitter’s retweet function allows people who are uneducated about social activism to participate in anti-racist shrine making. Though people who regularly retweet posts from social activists might not be actively involved in political organizing, Twitter allows people to participate in an online form of activism.

Chapters

In chapter one, I will argue that the initial responses of grief after George Floyd and

Breonna Taylor’s deaths created spontaneous virtual shrines on Twitter. These shrines served as a counter monument to those who denied the prevalence of racism in the United States’ criminal justice system. I will analyze the tweets that circulated on social media during the spring and summer months of 2020. These tweets largely utilized memorial art of the dead as well as direct references to the lives of the deceased to commemorate their death. These shrines also engaged

xv with the long history of systemic racism by including long lists of names of people who died due to racism and police brutality starting with George Floyd and typically ending with Emmett Till.

For chapter two I will assert that social media creates a space where people can meet in person and grieve together. This is important for black people within the United States and other nonwhite people because a community needs an opportunity not only to grieve the loss of the individual but also to protest the system that continually allows these deaths to happen. I will use virtual flyers that summon people to grieve at protests in their local cities as well as invitations to attend live streams of George Floyd’s funeral to argue that the next stage of shrine making process demonstrates a desire to experience tragedy together. I will also use Chris Singleton’s children’s book titled Different: A Story About Loving Your Neighbor to demonstrate that the necessity for communal grieving is long-term.

Lastly, in Chapter Four I will ponder whether performance of grief on social media is a sufficient moral and political response. Everyone is held accountable for grieving the loss of the dead and those that did not mourn George Floyd’s death were called out for not being anti- racist. This created a panopticon of grieving because people held other people accountable for performing grief in a way that addressed systemic racism. The phenomenon of

#BlackoutTuesday, however, where corporations and influencers interrupted their daily posting by posting black squares with the hashtag BLM, caused the BLM hashtag to get overrun with black squares rather than being able to highlight posts about upcoming protests, racism, and police brutality.

Disclaimer

This thesis would not be complete without addressing my own biases and limitations.

Despite my being Mexican American, I am white passing. This means that because of my white

xvi features, I do not experience racism in the same way that other people with darker skin experience racism. Also, given that racism effects members of each race differently, the forms and levels of racism I would experience as a Latina are not the same types of racism that a Black person experiences. Finally, since I am both white passing and not Black, I do not experience the same level of grief as Black people feel after each instance of racial violence. As an ally, I do feel a level of grief and anger after each racist killing of another Black person in the United

States. I do, however, have the privilege to turn off my grief and anger until the next racist killing becomes mainstream in the media. Black people in the United States do not have this same privilege. Whereas I feel a new level of grief after each murder, Black people experience every instance of grief stacked onto the layer of grief before that and so on since this directly affects their own community. Understanding the privileges that I have is essential in understanding possible biases I have while interpreting performances of grief through memorial making.

Virtual Shrines and the Twittersphere

Figure 1: @StanfordBGSA asks for memorial art submissions to honor Taylor's 27th Birthday.

Introduction

Nationwide grief and outrage grew during the spring and summer months of 2020 as people learned about the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. As COVID-19 lockdown restrictions limited physical gatherings, many people flocked to Twitter and other social media platforms to express their feelings and emotions on Taylor’s and Floyd’s sudden tragic deaths.

While many black people felt directly impacted by the loss of two more black people to police brutality, many sympathetic white people also grieved Floyd and Taylor’s deaths online as well.

The grieving responses mainly deployed elements of physical shrines such as photos of the dead, memorial art, hashtags, and short eulogies referencing the dead to form virtual shrines in the feeds of Twitter users.

Not everyone, however, participated in this virtual shrine making. Instead of eulogizing

the lives of Breonna Taylor and George

Floyd, a large group of Twitter users

defended the actions of the police officers

who killed them. This group of people used

their platforms on social media to justify the

violence that police officers inflicted on both Figure 2: @TomiLahren denies Breonna Taylor was murdered. Floyd and Taylor, emphasizing Floyd’s criminal background and Taylor’s boyfriend firing at the cops who were completing a no-knock warrant. In a tweet that garnered 20.7k likes, white conservative commentator Tomi Lahren tweeted that what happened to Taylor was “a TRAGEDY but not “MURDER.” (@TomiLahren,

2020). A 2016 study determined that black people were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by cops than white people, a fact that reveals a huge flaw in the United States criminal justice system (DeGue, Fowler, Calkins, 2016, s176) Despite this alarming statistic, Lahren remained unwilling to accept that race might have played a factor in the way the police precinct carried out the investigation of Taylor’s home. Her denial demonstrates a strong desire to maintain the racial status quo. The shrines served as a counter monument to police brutality, providing an opportunity for black people and allies to grieve the lives of Taylor and Floyd while also demanding that others wake up to the systems of white supremacy that tightly intwine themselves in the United States’ criminal justice system.

Spontaneous (Virtual) Shrines

Folklorist Jack Santino coined the term spontaneous shrines to describe the Northern Irish memorials he observed during The Troubles. While the press began to call these memorials

“makeshift shrines,” Santino thought this term was offensive to mourners and did not accurately reflect the processes that took place to create the shrines. Santino argued that “spontaneous” more correctly described the “unofficial nature” of the shrines that Northern Irish mourners created at sites where violence occurred without being told to do so. He also explains that

“shrines” was a better term than memorial because the assemblages he observed were public in nature and communicate with the dead (Santino, 2006, 13). Though the shrines that Santino observed were physical and could be visited by mourners, virtual collections of posts on Twitter function in a similar way.

As grievers learned about Floyd and Taylor’s deaths, many twitter users posted their thoughts, feelings, and emotions without being told to do so. Though social media challenges

such as #BlackOutTuesday (which I will discuss

in the third chapter) and calls for memorial art

that’s pictured in Figure 1 that directly invite

people to tweet about The Black Lives Matter

(BLM) movement, these trends developed later in

the grieving process. While I still argue that these

social media challenges contribute to a form of

shrine making, they do not fit the definition of a

spontaneous shrine because advance planning and

coordination of social media posts removes the

“unofficial nature” of these shrines. Most of the

Figure 3: @ReginaKing eulogizes Breonna Taylor's accomplishments on what would have been responses to grief over Floyd and Taylor’s deaths, Taylor's 27th Birthday. however, were unscripted as Twitter users

5 naturally felt compelled to tweet or share posts referencing their loss. In fact, Twitter reported a

17% increase in discussions about BLM and related topics after George Floyd’s death on May

25, 2020 (Bianchi, 2020). Many of these posts were like @ReginaKing’s memorial post that she tweeted on what would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday and featured a portrait of the dead, and a reflection on their life. As more people tweeted about Floyd and Taylor’s deaths, especially those following multiple social activists and organizational accounts, significant portions of people’s Twitter feeds were dedicated to grief (@ReginaKing, 2020). As Twitter users communicated their grief online, they invited other people to also communicate their grief thus fulfilling Santino’s second requirement for a spontaneous shrine.

As Twitter users shared their grief

for Floyd and Taylor’s losses, they also

directly convey the necessity for other

people to also communicate their own

grief. This communicative grief not only

Figure 4: @AiyanaBaker calls people out on their silence. reflected sadness of the individual’s death, but also grieved the system that allowed their deaths to occur. Unlike the shrines that

Santino observed in his research, social media is not fully anonymous. Social media largely erases the anonymity factor through usernames attached to profiles and typically operates through people following friends, family, and other acquaintances. Because of this lack of anonymity, Twitter users could note who was talking about BLM related topics and who was relatively silent. Those who were invested in the BLM cause quoted their own abbreviations of anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu’s quote, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” (Younge, 2009). Phrases like @AiyanaBaker’s “your

6 silence speaks volumes” in figure 3 circulated on Twitter and other social media sites to convey the necessity of speaking out against systemic racism (@AiyanaBaker, 2020). These communicative posts intermingled with other posts that directly reflected grief over Taylor and

Floyd’s losses to create a spontaneous shrine. By logging into Twitter and scrolling through their feeds, people were virtually walking into this shrine and had the ability to choose whether they wanted to participate or not.

The grief surrounding Floyd and Taylor’s deaths on Twitter, however, was not limited to these specific instances of police brutality. Instead, especially for black grievers, the grief expressed on social media after the murders of Floyd and Taylor seemed to compound onto the grief felt after other instances of racialized violence.

Compounded Grief

For black Twitter users who participated in the

virtual shrine making, the grief demonstrated in their

posts was not entirely referencing the grief they felt

for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Instead,

Floyd and Taylor’s deaths were another reminder to

the black community that the United States has a

long history of racial violence and police brutality.

This led Twitter users such as Black American

attorney, Ben Crump, to post long lists of names of

Figure 5: @AttorneyCrump lists a long list of people who died in racist attacks or altercations with names of black people that died due to racism and police brutality. police beginning with George Floyd’s name and ending with Emmett Till and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s (@AttorneyCrump, 2020). These

7 events not only paid homage to those that have died, but also represents that systemic racism is still a prominent issue in the United States. Similar racial climates that led to the brutal lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 remain today allowing police brutality to occur without justice. Black people and sympathetic white people understand this struggle exists, hence why a lot of grievers linked the lynching of Emmett Till with Floyd and Taylor’s deaths.

Posts linking Floyd’s and Taylor’s deaths with Emmett Till served as a counter- monument to those that denied systemic racism still had a strong hold on American society. In her research on counter-monuments, Art Historian Sabrina DeTurk argues that counter monuments that include names represent a necessity to interact with the lost individuals. In her article on Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, DeTurk writes that names are included in monuments when a monument needs to be a “space of sustained engagement and interaction on the part of the general public.” (DeTurk, 2017, 85). This defends the motivations for grievers to include the names of past victims of racial violence and brutality in Tweets. While there has not been enough time to begin to view these shrines as counter monuments, virtual shrines to victims of racial violence use similar techniques to engage the public. Like countermonuments, these long lists of names of the victims of racial violence serves as a public engagement method, demanding passive observers to notice the lingering racism in a post-Civil

Rights society. These lists were intended to make those that had remained silent about racial injustice see the effects of their silence through the many victims of racial violence and police brutality. As twitter users read through these lists of names, which sometimes required multiple threads to honor the victims, they were also forced to consider how similar sentiments about black people killed both Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and George Floyd. Lastly, after reckoning with the long history of racial violence and police brutality in the United States, these lists of

8 names also communicated with the audience how much work needed to continue to be done to truly create a post racial society.

Repeated Spontaneity

The shrine making processes documented in this chapter have varying levels of spontaneity. For instance, as time progressed, much of the initial fervor surrounding George

Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s deaths wore off. Fewer people posted about their grief, and fewer still communicated for people remaining silent to speak up. Also, as more posts such as

#BlackOutTuesday became more scripted, telling people when to post, the “unofficial nature” of these shrines began to slack off until new developments emerge in the Taylor’s and Floyd’s

deaths such as court cases and

anniversaries.

While the justice system originally

did not want to prosecute the officers

involved in Taylor’s death, nationwide

protests, petitions, and multiple phone

calls demanding a trial forced the state

Kentucky to finally act. A grand jury

indicted former detective Brett Hankinson

for 3 counts of wanton endangerment for

firing bullets that hit neighboring

apartments on September 23, 2020. No Figure 6: @AprilDRyan demonstrates grief after the conclusion of Breonna Taylor's court case. other actions were taken against the other two officers involved in the case, nor was anyone directly charged for killing Taylor (Treisman,

Booker, Romo, 2020). The results of the trial angered many leading to #BreonnaTaylorMatters trending on Twitter the next day as they expressed their grief that the justice system had failed

Taylor. Journalist and White House Correspondent April D Ryan tweeted a screenshot of an earlier tweet by Breonna Taylor claiming no one has supported her with “Your life will not be in vain” attached to the screenshot (@AprilDRyan, 2020). Taylor tweeted her original tweet a month before her death and Ryan shared it to mirror own grief that the criminal justice system failed to hold anyone accountable for Taylor’s death. This mirrored other Twitter users’ thoughts, feelings, and emotions about the grand jury’s decision in Taylor’s case who revived the spontaneous shrine making process.

This concept of renewed spontaneity differs from the memorialization of other tragic events because it reflects the lingering of events. Unlike instances such as the 1857 Mountain

Meadows Massacre which involved Mormon a militia killing over 100 wagon trainers, black people perceive racial violence and police brutality as an ongoing threat. History largely regards the Mountain Meadow’s Massacre as a tragic event in the past allowing people to move on from their grief of these events rather than maintaining a constant state of grief. Memorializations to events like the Mountain Meadows Massacre reflect disassociations from the tragedy by removing the raw emotions of grief from their repertoire. In his analysis of a monument the state of Utah erected to memorialize the victims of the massacre, Foote argues that commemorations typically happen on the 50th or 100th anniversaries of tragic events. This time away from the event removes most of the grief from the event allowing monuments to serve as reminders of significant events happened. Foote writes,

“The delay allows time for the past to be ﬁltered. Tragedies can be transformed into coherent and cohesive heroic epics. Equivocal and ambiguous events can be positioned in a positive light.” (foote, 2003, 262-263)

Commemorations to victims of racial violence, however, happen more frequently and are less restricted by time. Due to the repeated nature of racial violence, however, black people do not have the leisure to distance themselves away from grief for victims of police brutality. This means that their grief constantly compounds on itself every anniversary that passes by without justice and after the news releases another story about the police killing another black person.

Grieving Offline

Figure 1: @ZevrahcEroom moves the focus of the George Floyd protests from George Floyd’s death to address white supremacy.

Introduction

Following the initial online responses to grief after the murders of George Floyd and

Breonna Taylor, people began to question what they should do next. This led to a transition away from spontaneous shrine making to a more coordinated responses of grief. Rather than focusing primarily on the raw emotions after the death of another black person, newer shrines consisting of invitations to grieve together responded to the need for healing as a community. These posts provided information on where potential grievers should convene as they sought to bring different communities of grievers together. These new shrines displayed the necessity for systemic change in hopes that another tragic event like the racist murders of George Floyd and

Breonna Taylor would not happen again.

Assemblages of invitations to protests, virtually streamed funerals, and discussions about race helped to create a sense of community between those police brutality actively affected and those who were sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter cause. Tweets containing information about communal opportunities to grieve formed a shrine of their own within the preexisting shrines on social media. These newer shrines served as virtual calls to action as they solicited

12 those participating in the shrine making process to not only grieve the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, but also grieve and demand change from the system that led to their deaths.

Though these virtual calls for action do not resemble the visual aesthetic of a physical shrine, they operate in a similar way. A physical shrine is designed to communicate with the system that led to an individual’s death, engage with the deceased victims as well as with the creator’s own emotions surrounding the tragic loss, and to provide a space to “anonymously express forbidden or unsanctioned sentiments” (Santino, 2001, 90). While social media largely erases the anonymity factor, unless a person uses a fake account that does not easily give clear indications of their identity, these online call to actions fulfill the other three basic functions of a shrine. For instance, invitations to public protests, vigils, and discussions centering on race serve as an attestation the people attending those events do not support the circumstances that caused

Breonna Taylor’s and George Floyd’s death. Secondly, these invitations interact with an individual’s murder while also communicating with other people’s feelings of loss and desire to stop police brutality. As these physical invitations to grieve and protest the circumstances of an individuals’ death assemble, they form their own shrine that obligates groups of people not only to address systemic racism, but to also grieve together as a community.

Grieving in Protest

The United States erupted into

spontaneous protests across the

country immediately after the

death of George Floyd. As the days

progressed and the initial fervor of

Figure 7: @eddieswell tweets an George Floyd’s death wore off, the invitation for a BLM protest.

13 protests for Black Lives Matter required more solicitation and planning to ensure a turnout. Soon social media users began to tweet and share posts containing information about protests days in advance of the planned events. These protest flyers developed their own sect of the shrine making process as they sought to initiate change to the system of white supremacy. Unlike the shrine making elements that directly grieved Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s deaths, the assemblages of tweeted protest flyers formed new shrines that drifted away from grieving individual instances of racial violence. In doing so, these shrines progressed the necessary commentary about systemic racism and police brutality that allowed George Floyd and Breonna

Taylor to die.

While physical shrines create a tangible location to visit the location where violence occurred, shrines consisting of protest flyers are not confined to a specific geography. Folklorist

Harriet Senie observed that drive by shrines for Malice Green, an African American victim of police brutality, provided grievers with a specific location to communally grieve where the violence occurred. Senie explains this is because “spontaneous memorials are inherently also expressions of protest, calling attention to the underlying conditions that led to the random death(s) being commemorated” (Senie, 2006). Though the shrines for Green followed the precedent of what a shrine looked like with “written messages, candles, shells,” and other

African American religious symbols, protest flyers do not always follow this format (Senie,

2006). Instead, the only requirement for a protest flyer is to have the date, time, and location of a protest. Also, unlike the roadside memorials for Malice Green, shrines formed by assemblages of protest flyers do not have to point to the exact location where racial violence occurred. For instance, @eddieswell shared a protest flyer for El Paso for Black Lives that contained only a visual image of a sun and information about meeting at Cleveland Square in Texas

(@eddieswell, 2020). Cleveland Square has no significant connection with Minneapolis where

Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd or Louisville, Kentucky where a group of police officers killed Breonna Taylor. The protest flyers in conjunction with all the other protest information

Twitter users shared, instead, formed a sect of shrines that brought attention to city and town centers near the tweeter’s residence. Unlike the roadside shrines that intrinsically served as a protest space in predetermined areas, protest flyers were less dependent on specific locations where racialized violence occurred as they were ensuring that people would assemble at these locations in protest.

Funerals and Communal Grieving

George Floyd was laid to rest on June 9th, 2020 giving grievers two weeks after his

murder to unpack their emotions about his

death. By this point, much of the initial

grieving process had concluded and

grievers were beginning to perform

formalized methods of coping with Floyd’s

loss. Through the context of her studies on

9/11 memorials, folklorist Kay Turner

Figure 8: @CNN tweets a notice that they will livestream George Floyd's funeral. makes a distinction between grieving and mourning. Turner defines grieving as the immediate response to a tragic and unexpected death while she describes mourning as the

“formal performances of accepting death…” (Turner, 2009, 161). Using this distinction, funerals would typically be considered an example of a mourning ritual outside of the lens of racial violence. Due to the repeated nature of racialized violence, however, black people cannot fully

15 reach a mourning state for a victim of racial violence. This is because racial violence is a perpetual threat and therefore can never be fully accepted. While sympathetic white grievers can eventually a reach state of acceptance after a racial killing as racial violence does not affect them, black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) constantly face the threat of racial violence. Because of this, George Floyd’s livestreamed funeral represented a liminal state between grieving and mourning since the repetitive nature of racialized violence prevents BIPOC to fully enter a mourning state.

Grievers recognized this liminal state between grieving and mourning as they referenced the recurrence of racial violence. Millions who responded to tweeted invitations to George

Floyd’s livestreamed funeral watched as civil rights activist and minister Reverend Al Sharpton lamented not only George Floyd’s death but the circumstances that led to his murder as well.

During his eulogy, Sharpton referenced Floyd’s funeral saying “… it [was] not a normal funeral.

It [was] not a normal circumstance but it’s too common and we need to deal with it.” (Sharpton,

2020). Another griever, Yolanda Jackson, alluded to the potential permanence of the grieving period by recognizing that she had grown up attending funerals like Floyd’s but still envisioned a better future. During her eulogy Yolanda said, “I want a better future for [my son], I want the change I don’t want to see him turn my age and we’re still dealing with this issue…” (Kamath,

2020). Unlike the memorial services after 9/11 that Kay Turner documented in her research that represented the beginning of mourning and eventual healing, the tributes delivered at Floyd’s funeral make it clear that this period of healing is not possible without first changing the system of white supremacy that is deeply ingrained in the United States.

This relatively permanent liminal state between grieving and mourning creates the space for communitas to form as those seek to navigate it. Victor Turner defined communitas as a

16 shared form of living during a liminal period (Turner, 1969, 96). As groups of people experienced a liminal period together, Turner noticed that they began to share a common mentality that defied normal social hierarchies as they ventured through their liminal state. This theory of liminality is essential in understanding the importance of Twitter users posting information about livestreams on their social media accounts because it demonstrates the necessity to cope with the liminality through a communal mindset.

The Twitter users who posted information about how to view George Floyd’s funeral online reflected the need for two types of communitas to help navigate the period after Floyd’s burial. Rev. Al Sharpton wrote in a tweet that Floyd’s funeral represented a period of personal mourning (@TheRevAl, 2020). This shared mindset formed a global communitas between black people who felt personally affected by Floyd’s loss. This communitas can be characterized by an ethos developed around “Black-Love.” Haile Cole explains that “black love” or the formation of community as a response to shared traumas has been an essential element in black survival (Cole, 2019,213).

As news broke out about Floyd’s murder, Nana

Akufo-Addo, the president of Ghana, spoke directly with Floyd’s family to express empathy that many

Ghanaians felt after Floyd’s murder. On top of this, the

Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) prepared a ceremony with traditional funeral rites to grieve Floyd’s murder and permanently erected a memorial to Floyd in the

City’s capital. Ghanaian Journalist Elizabeth Ohene explained that the reason why Ghanaians grieved Figure 9: Reverend Al Sharpton described Floyd's Funeral as a period of reckoning.

Floyd’s death in solidarity with black people in the U.S. was because “many people took it personally here” thus demonstrating that the shared acknowledgement of grief between black people all over the world (Ohene, 2020). While black people globally experienced communitas due to their shared blackness, nonblack people also formed their own consciousness centered about anti-racism.

Rev. Sharpton’s tweet after Floyd’s burial also highlighted a “national reckoning” as nonblack people contemplated their roles in Floyd’s death. As invitations to grieve Floyd’s loss circulated twitter, other reactionary tweets emerged forcing nonblack people to confront their roles in systemic racism. Before Floyd’s death, many nonblack people thought that not being racist was enough to prevent racial violence. After Floyd’s death, however, more nonblack people accepted that they needed to be actively anti-racist in all their daily interactions to prevent more racial violence. Statements such as former American Football player Doug Baldwin Jr.’s tweet asserting that “It is not enough to be not-racist” served as a reminder to white and other

nonblack people that they all played a role in

Floyd’s murder by not providing a critique of

the larger institution of systemic racism. As

more nonblack people acknowledged the

necessity of actively speaking out against Figure 10: A tweet by Doug Baldwin Jr. demanding direct action against racism. racism, they developed their own group of communitas by adopting anti-racist practices in both their online and in person interactions.

A potential critique of sympathetic white people’s participation in the larger communitas of healing, however, is the fact that a lot of white people were motivated by white guilt. While black people developed a global need for communitas because of the loss of another black man

18 due to racism, some white people needed communitas to heal from the realization they were to blame for Floyd’s and Taylor’s murders. White author Robin DiAngelo in her book about white fragility explains that white guilt is not beneficial to healing the larger institution of systemic racism. Instead, she writes “Tears that are driven by white guilt are self-indulgent,” meaning that people who need communitas because of the sudden knowledge their privilege led to another black person’s death does not actually aid in the healing of black people. Instead, DiAngelo quotes an interview from an anonymous black colleague to show white guilt does not demonstrate solidarity to black people’s necessity to heal. Instead, the colleague said white people’s tears remind them that,

“We are only allowed to have feelings for the sake of [white people’s] entertainment, as in the presentation of our funerals. And even then, there as expectations of what is allowed for us to express. We are abused daily, beaten, raped, and killed but [white people] are sad and that’s what is important.” (DiAngelo, 2020, 105)

While many nonblack people participate in communitas to eliminate injustice, many others need time to grieve their own privileges they have as nonblack people. While nonblack people’s participation in communitas because of a genuine desire to eliminate racial inequality can be beneficial to healing, white guilt is counterintuitive to black people’s involvement in communitas as it restricts their ability to accurately express grief.

This poses an important conundrum that nonblack, especially white people, must analyze before expressing grief online and in person. They must not only analyze their own responses to black people’s grief, but also make sure that their involvement in communitas does not inhibit the proper societal changes needed for black people to reach a full state of healing. In other words, nonblack people must evaluate whether they are building virtual shrines to protest the loss of another black person or if they are grieving

19 their loss of ignorance on the roles they play in racial violence. A children’s book titled

Different: A Story About Loving Your Neighbor provides commentary about not only the longevity of black people’s grief, but also beneficial ways that white people can participate in communitas without hindering black people’s ability to properly grieve their loss.

Different: A Story About Loving Your Neighbor

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof killed 8 black churchgoers and their pastor in a racist

attack on the Emmanuel African Methodist

Episcopal Church. Author and former baseball

player Chris Singleton’s mom, Sharonda Coleman-

Singleton, was one of the people that Roof killed

in the attack. Singleton released his first children’s

book, titled Different: A Story About Loving Your

Neighbor, to aid people in discussions about

prejudice and racism with children. He advertised

heavily on Twitter just days before the Charleston

Massacre’s fifth anniversary. Figure 11: A Tweet by Chris Singleton highlighting his motivation for writing Different. Different follows the story of a young

Nigerian immigrant named Obinna as he attends his first day of school in Charleston, South

Carolina. At first the school children judge Obinna because of his hair and his dashiki, but after

Obinna helps his class win a schoolwide competition, the students began to accept Obinna and his differences. The book concludes with the school children asking their teacher Mrs. Sharonda

20 to teach them about Nigeria and Obinna exclaiming that that was the best day of his new life in the United States (Singleton, 2020).

The release of Different five years after Dylann Roof violently attacked Mother

Emmanuel AME is significant in understanding the longevity of grief after racial violence. While the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are relatively new in the United States’ consciousness, the Charleston Massacre occurred over half a decade ago. Chris Singleton wrote that “[His] mother’s life was taken away because of racism, but [he promises] to keep using [his] voice to put an end to it!” in a tweet articulating his motivations for writing Different. Unlike

Kay Turner’s research on 9/11, which depicted the transition of grief into mourning and acceptance, the grief after racialized violence does not have a direct route to mourning. Due to the continual nature of racialized violence, as one accepts the death of an individual, the eventual murder of another individual continues the grieving process. Singleton’s acknowledgement that racism killed his mother and continues to kill many other black people in the United States provides insight to the future of grieving of Floyd’s and Taylor’s deaths. If there is no change to the institution of systemic racism, then more racial violence will continue such as it already has within the last five years after the Charleston Massacre. The understanding that racial violence shows no clear sign of ending emphasizes the grieving period for victims of racial violence is continual.

Secondly, the intent of Different to spark conversations about racism and prejudice demonstrates the necessity for systemic change and communitas after racialized violence. After his experience with racialized violence, Singleton wrote Different because he felt that sparking conversations about difference is an effective tactic to alleviate racialized violence despite the discomfort of the topic. Also, since children’s books are meant to be read to children before bed

21 or in classroom settings, Different is a valuable resource for helping children participate in the anti-racist mindset like the antiracist consciousness displayed on Twitter after Floyd’s death.

Also, Different provides nonwhite children with a chance to discuss how they have experienced racism with other nonwhite children who have similar experiences, creating a shared consciousness over similar experiences. This desire to create communitas between white and nonwhite children after the Charleston Massacre demonstrates that there is a constant need for communitas if systemic racism continues its tight grip on society in the United States.

Is Performance of Grief Enough?

Figure 1: A Tweet by user @mariahbcooley arguing that the social media trend #BlackOutTuesday is "clout chasing."

The Performance of Grief

The earlier parts of this paper have discussed ways that social media can serve as a grieving space for the victims of racialized violence. Twitter’s constant feed of posts work together simultaneously with individual profiles to provide the survivors of racialized violence with a space to create real time shrines. These shrines are often political in nature as they demand structural and institutional change and naturally form through assemblages of posts and discussions that twitter users participate in by tweeting and sharing memorial art and other posts that directly reference the dead. While social media provides those experiencing loss with a public grieving space, others who are less affected or even unaffected by the loss participate in shrine making for personal benefit. These interventions in the normal shrine making process rarely address feelings of grief over the loss of the individual. Posts that perform grief after an instance of racial violence not only address the longevity of grief but also seek to eliminate the stronghold of white supremacy through political shrine making. These performances of grief recognize the history of racial violence in the United States and seek to instill the necessary long-

23 term work to create a more equitable society for black people. As argued throughout this thesis, protest shrines to victims of racial violence create a long-term discussion centering on systemic racism as they beg the audience to change the system that killed another Black person.

Performative justice, on the other hand, displays grief as a passing moment and does little to address the circumstances that caused the sorrow to begin with. As depicted in

@mariahbcooley’s tweet, those participating in performative justice are only participating in virtual shrine making when it is trendy while they do little to nothing when the appeal to protest wears off. This often redirects the focus from what activists are attempting to change to who is participating in protest, as many influencers and companies use protest as a clout chasing method on social media. The trendiness of protest, however, does not determine whether the fight is over. In fact, the popularity of protest typically fades despite black people and other minorities still being in danger of racial violence (@mariahbcooley, 2020). In other words, performance- based activism creates false security that once protesting racism is no longer trendy, issues of police brutality and systemic racism are either solved or no longer a threat. The

#BlackOutTuesday phenomenon demonstrates that performance-based activism mainly benefits the entities that participate in it while negatively impacting the grieving processes that it coopts.

The #BlackOutTuesday Phenomenon

An example of performative activism is the corporate participation in the

#BlackOutTuesday phenomenon that occurred after the death of George Floyd on June 2, 2020.

Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, two black women who work in the music industry, created the social media event to call out the music industry’s appropriation of black culture.

They did this under the original hashtag #TheShowMustBePaused which they paired with a black square to help bring attention to the music industry’s lack of a response to systemic racism

24 despite regularly profiting off black creators’ labor. In a statement reported by the New York

Times, the women wrote “’…Our mission is to hold the industry at large, including major corporations + their partners who benefit from the efforts, struggles and successes of Black people accountable.’” As women in control of social media marketing, the women used

#TheShowMustBePaused to mark a pause in posting advertisement for a day so information regarding Black Lives Matter would not have to compete with other posts on social media

(Coscarelli, 2020). While ceasing posting for day symbolically recreates “a moment of silence” for victims of racialized violence, it is also, in theory, an effective form of protest since the music industry heavily relies on social media marketing for income. The silence was also meant to allow protest organizers to have full priority over Twitter’s algorithms without competing posts from the music industry. Thomas and Agyemang never intended for the

#TheShowMustBePaused to transform into #BlackOutTuesday, nor did they mean for the hashtags to be paired with the Black Lives Matter hashtag. Nonetheless, the potential effectiveness of their hashtag quickly diminished as other social media users outside of the music industry transformed #TheShowMustBePaused into #BlackOutTuesday.

This thesis documents three main folk groups in the virtual shrine Figure 2: @AutumnBurgin discusses people who participated in #BlackOutTuesday without speaking out against racism to begin with making process; those who are affected by police brutality and racism, sympathetic shrine making participants who have a desire to end white supremacy, and those that are avidly against the Black Lives Matter movement. This chapter brings attention to two more folk groups: sympathetic to the cause but may not be as active or knowledgeable about social media and those who only participate in

25 virtual shrine making for victims of racialized violence when it is beneficial for them to do so.

The last group’s misappropriation of the #BlackOutTuesday movement turned a well-intended hashtag into a social movement’s worst nightmare. While the purpose of

#TheShowMustBePaused was to force social media dependent businesses and companies to cease marketing for a day, like in a game of telephone, the goal and use of the hashtag quickly devolved. As folklorist Lynne McNeill explains, modes of transmission require communication between people which can cause elements of the original story to be changed or altered by accident because people are not perfect (McNeill, 2013 27-30). These altered versions are then shared to other people who also slightly alter the story they hear which explains the transition into #BlackOutTuesday. As a few users who may not be as knowledgeable about social media or the origins of #TheShowMustBePaused began participating in #BlackOutTuesday using the

Black Lives Matter related hashtags. Soon people who were only loosely invested in the Black

Lives Matter movement such as corporations and social media influencers also began posting the black squares with BLM related hashtags. This was problematic because instead of sharing important information relating to Black Lives Matter, many people completely stopped posting for that day.

Some Twitter users such as @AutumnBurgin also pointed out that some of the people who participated in #BlackOutTuesday never spoke out about racism before the viral hashtag. In a tweet referencing certain people’s silence, @AutumnBurgin writes “it feels like a performance and that’s it” (@AutumnBurgin, 2020). While @AutumnBurgin’s tweet did not call out social media users who actively commented about systems of oppression and later participated in

#BlackOutTuesday. @AutumnBurgin’s tweet, however, brings attention to the tweeters stayed silent before #BlackOutTuesday and only chose to participate in the shrine making process when

#BlackOutTuesday granted them a space to say something without saying anything. By sharing a black square with no words on it, depended on the Twitter users who shared it to remain completely silent for the rest of the day. If those same Twitter users made no effort to discuss racism before sharing the black square, however, defeated the purpose of the momentary silence.

Other twitter users quickly pointed out the hypocrisy of large corporations such as US-based women’s retailer Fashion Nova for participating in #BlackOutTuesday despite not representing the ideals of

Black Lives Matter in their daily Figure 3: User @FLunitik questions @FashionNova's use of the Black Out Tuesday hashtag business practices.

Corporate-Sponsored Slacktivism

Fashion Nova joined other companies such as YouTube and Spotify in tweeting a black square which flustered some twitter users. Twitter users such as @FLunitik commented on

@FashionNova’s tweet, bringing attention to the long list of accusations against Fashion Nova’s and claiming that the company steals designs from Black fashion designers. In their tweet replying to @FashionNova’s original post, @FLunitik writes that the only reason Fashion Nova spoke out against systemic racism was because “… if we are all dead, you won’t have your own original ideas to steal,” thus implying that Black lives only matter to Fashion Nova because of the stolen labor Black people provide for the company (@FLunitik, 2020) (@FashionNova,

2020). Fashion Nova’s participation in #BlackOutTuesday represents a larger problem of what researcher Anne Landman calls “Corporate-sponsored slacktivism.”

Corporate-sponsored slacktivism is a form of performative justice or an inauthentic performance of grief, that companies often market to customers. Corporate-sponsored slacktivism is a marketing campaign where a company advocates for a policy to make it appear that it is beneficial at addressing a social interest but does little to nothing to actual solve the issue. Anne Landman analyzes Corporate-sponsored slacktivism through large tobacco companies’ attempts to still profit from cigarette sales despite the increasing number of restrictions the government has placed against cigarette use. Landman provides the example of how a group of board members from Philip Morris drafted a set of policies in 1987 that would maintain cigarette sales by creating smoking and nonsmoking areas in public spaces after laws started to ban smoking entirely. The Board members, according to Landman, proposed that these policies helped to maintain the interests of both those who wanted to smoke in public and those that wanted clean air. Of course, Landman points out that smoke does not stay in one area, making this policy useless for people who wanted to breathe clean air while still maintaining cigarette sales. Landman concludes her argument by writing “[corporate-sponsored slacktivism] is, in short, implemented to stop social change that could, in the long run, be crucial to society's long-term well-being” (Landman, 2008). Corporate-sponsored slacktivism is not limited to the business practices of tobacco companies such as Philip Morris, but rather extends to other types of businesses and corporations’ discussions, or lack thereof, about systemic racism.

Whereas Landman largely analyzes the corporate-sponsored slacktivism through the lens of policies that specific companies make to maintain business, this same concept applies to large companies like Fashion Nova who participated in #BlackOutTuesday. Despite not creating a

28 specific policy that directly affects the Black Lives Matter Movement, the #BlackOutTuesday square deploys a similar strategy and motivation to that which the board member of Philip

Morris deployed in 1987. Companies like Fashion Nova participated in virtual shrine making using #BlackOutTuesday to put on the performance of grief of victims of racialized violence without changing their problematic practice of stealing designs from black designers.

As companies and other public figures become more dependent on social media for marketing, appealing to the public through Twitter and other platforms is a priority for businesses like Fashion Nova. These businesses and figures must remain relevant to the demographics to which they market their products, which often forces them to participate in discussions of issues such as police brutality if they feel they would lose more profits from staying silent than making a pro Black Lives Matter statement. Companies still do this even if they do little to address their own problematic behavior.

Accountability Culture and Forcing Grief

21st century consumers are invested in supporting companies that align with their personal beliefs and moral codes. Evidence of this is how left leaning people boycotted the fast- food restaurant Chick-Fil-A after the CEO said they did not support same-sex marriages in 2012 as well as another boycott of Goya after the CEO supported President Donald Trump’s re- election campaign in 2020 (Heil, 2020). Conservatives also demonstrated their distaste for Nike by starting a viral trend of recording themselves burning their trainers after the company released an advertisement featuring Colin Kaepernick who gained notoriety for kneeling during the national anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement (Bostock, 2020). One thing the boycotts of Goya and Chick-Fil-A and the Nike shoe burnings have in common is that they were all attempts made by consumers to hold companies accountable for their actions. The threats of

29 mass boycotts give power to the consumer to persuade companies to take (or not take in the case of the #BoycottNike) sometimes controversial political statements.

Accountability culture provides both positive and negative reinforcement on entities that rely heavily on social media marketing’s behavior. For instance, despite the #BoycottNike trend, many more people decided to purchase products because of Nike’s anti-racist stance than those that promised to never buy another Nike product again. After the advertisement with Colin

Kaepernick, Nike’s sales boosted by 31% proving that sometimes it is beneficial for companies to participate in anti-racist movements (Martinez, 2018). Inversely, if a company does something that its consumers find morally wrong, consumers can choose to boycott the company and therefore reduce the company’s revenue. If enough people decide to boycott, this can force companies to change their problematic practices, therefore keeping them accountable for their actions. Immediately after George Floyd’s murder, businesses were expected to perform grief on social media after Floyd’s death or risk being #cancelled.

One of the many companies that was canceled after the murder of George Floyd was fitness brand CrossFit, after the CEO Greg Glassman tweeted a racist tweet referring to Floyd’s murder. Shortly after Glassman posted the tweets, CrossFit immediately lost key partnerships with other large companies such as the sports clothing brand Reebok. After the massive loss to revenue, CrossFit forced Glassman to step down from his position of CEO as an attempt to regain recover after Glassman’s racist words (Gorman, Taylor, 2020). Glassman was not only canceled for posting incredibly racist and hurtful tweets, but also because of his refusal to participate in the shrine making process. Instead of sympathizing with the black community over the loss of another black person in the United States, Glassman decided to intensify the black people’s pain by posting negative tweets about Floyd’s death. This failure to perform an

30 acceptable level of sympathy towards Floyd and his community not only cost CrossFit thousands of dollars, but also cost Glassman his job. The fear of similar social retribution and extreme loss of revenue motivated Fashion Nova to participate in shrine making on social media despite their not actually caring about protecting the integrity of black creators work or black lives.

Though posting insincere performances of grief on social media seems relatively harmless, Fashion Nova, along with many other social media users, directly impacted the Black

Lives Matter movement in a negative way due to the inclusion of #BlackLivesMatter along with

#BlackOutTuesday’s black squares.

Black Out Tuesday’s Coordination Problem

Fashion Nova’s insincere performance of

grief along with that of many other social media

users who may or may not have good intentions

while participating in the viral trend interfered

with the spread of information of Black Lives

Matter related posts. While #BlackOutTuesday

was not a movement associated with BLM, many

users including Fashion Nova attached

#BlackLivesMatter to their posts with black

squares. Many activists pleaded with social

Figure 4: User @KenidraRWoods_ asks followers not media users to not participate in to post #BlackLivesMatter if participating in # #BlackOutTuesday. #BlackOutTuesday using #BLM or

#BlackLivesMatter as shown in figure 4, because doing so could block important information regarding BLM from being seen (KenidraRWoods_asks, 2020). Despite concerns, many people

31 continued to post black squares using the BLM affiliated hashtags. This meant that people seeking information about systemic racism and about protests in which they intended to participate found the BLM affiliated hashtag searches flooded with black squares instead.

Since the media was largely interested in posting videos of riots and looting, the

Black Lives Matter related

Figure 5: User @PrestonMichum asks people to stop posting hashtags were the main way that #BlackOutTuesday squares under the BLM hashtag. information was shared to protestors after George Floyd’s death. Twitter users who were dedicated to addressing systemic racism used their platforms to share videos of the protests which provided a counternarrative to what the media portrayed on air. Also, twitter posts also served as informal trainings to first time protestors about how to protest safely creating a necessity for the BLM related hashtags to stay relevant to BLM associated tweets. Preston

Mitchum explains this necessity by writing that the black squares tweeters were tweeting were

“literally blacking our important resources (bail, funding, etc.)” (@PrestonMitchum, 2020). This information was necessary during the George Floyd protests because many protestors were arrested by cops while fighting for racial justice. According to The Washington Post, 570 protestors were arrested in Minneapolis due to their affiliation to the George Floyd protests

(Kornfield, Ramsey, Wallace, et al., 2020).

The Black Lives Matter hashtags, as mentioned by Dr. Mitchum, were meant to inform protestors of what to do if they were to be arrested by cops. The hashtags were also meant to provide the protestors to help them get out of jail through bail bonding as well as help get lawyers to those who were arrested but could not afford one. As the textless black squares filled

32 the hashtags, however, protestors could not gain access to these important materials as easily as they a few days prior to #BlackOutTuesday. Not only did #BlackOutTuesday black out information from protestors, but #BlackOutTuesday hurt BLM’s ability to recruit more advocates.

Along with information about when protests were to take place, the Black Lives Matter hashtag was also responsible for spreading general information about police brutality and to explain what Black Lives Matter was advocating for. This information was not only essential for letting supporters know where to congregate, but also provided those on the fence about Black

Lives Matter due to a lack of knowledge about the movement the information they needed to join the cause. Zeynep Tufecki (2017) argues “the ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements…” (Tufecki, xxiii). Social media’s ability to gain and retain supporters for BLM after George Floyd’s murder not only reflected Tufecki’s central argument, but also intensified her argument due to George Floyd’s death happening during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic

and global lockdowns, many people were

confined to their homes to stop the spread

of the disease. Social media platforms such

as Twitter provided many of these people,

especially those who were high risk of the

coronavirus with chances to safely

participate in political shrine making. As

one Twitter user, @marycreatesart, Figure 5: @marycreatesart posts a video of Georg Floyd Protests in Milwaukee

33 acknowledges that she cannot actively participate in physical protests because she is immunocompromised, she still felt that the George Floyd protests in Milwaukee were important enough to document on Twitter. She the posted a video of the protests, thus participating in the virtual shrine making documenting George Floyd’s life and death on Twitter (@marycreatesart,

2020). @marycreatesart’s story reflected many other people who were high risk of Covid-19’s story and their participation in political shrine making on twitter. As more people and corporations such as Fashion Nova filled the BLM affiliated hashtags with black squares rather than posts relating to BLM thus disrupting the virtual shrine making process of other twitter users who were more reliant on social media to express their grief after George Floyd’s death.

Conclusion

The case study of #BlackOutTuesday relates to the broader discussion of shrine making on social media because it demonstrates how not every participation in virtual shrine making reflects a desire to change the status quo. While performances of grief on social media aim to change the stronghold of white supremacy so that an eventual stage of healing can be obtained, other performances of grief These performances that do not lead to healing are purely performative and rarely address the systemic issues that directly lead to the murders of black people within the United States. Though the common saying is “all publicity is good publicity,” purely performative expressions of grief can interfere with other people’s grieving processes.

Through the case study of #BlackOutTuesday, this trend is increasingly clear as many social media users and larger corporations participated in #BlackOutTuesday to the BLM affiliated hashtags, thus blocking the spread of other information and demonstrations of grief through the hashtags. This directly hurt those who used social media to safely grieve in protest the murder of

George Floyd during the coronavirus pandemic, since for a day their posts were clouded by black

34 squares rather than posts that directly referenced the deaths of Floyd. This demonstrates how not all participation on shrine making is beneficial to grieving the loss of black people within the

Unites States. While some people legitimately participated in shrine making on social media to address systemic racism and to help prevent future racial killings, others such as corporations like Fashion Nova, participate in the shrine making process. The pressure to participate in the shrine making process was largely because a failure to do so would lead to a loss in sales.

Ending Notes and the Future of Virtual Shrines

Expressions of grief on Twitter after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd created virtual shrines that not only commemorated the lives of the lost and demanded systemic change, but also communicated the longevity of an indefinite grief for those whom police brutality regularly effects. With the help of Twitter algorithms, both black and sympathetic nonblack Twitter users created spontaneous shrines as they tweeted posts directly referencing the lives and deaths of Floyd and Taylor. These posts commonly grieved the loss of the individual by reflecting on their life while also conveying a necessity to challenge the systems of white supremacy. Also, by juxtaposing Taylor’s and Floyd’s death with the murders of Rev. Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr. and Emmett Till, these spontaneous shrines communicated that, due to the repeated nature of racial violence, the deaths of Floyd and Taylor, while tragic, were at some level expected.

Twitter shrines became less spontaneous as time progressed after Floyd and Taylor’s death to address other aspects of the grieving process. These posts moved away from the initial grief responses as they sought to address the systems of white supremacy that led to Taylor’s and

Floyd’s deaths. Twitter users who participated in this later shrine making process created shrines through the repeated sharing of invitations to physically grieve with other black people or empathetic nonblack people. Solicitations to grieve in person often consisted of protest flyers and invitations to join livestreams of Floyd’s funeral. As the posts indicted the systems of white supremacy that killed Taylor, they also addressed the need for communal grieving. Experiencing tragedy together provided black people with an online support system to help them navigate the indefinite grieving period while also centering nonblack people on anti-racist mindsets.

Not everyone who participates in the shrine making process on Twitter, however, has a genuine desire to end system racism. Social media challenges such as #BlackOutTuesday provide large corporations and social media influencers with a space to participate in the shrine making process for their own self-interest. While many well-meaning anti-racist people also participated in the #BlackOutTuesday to help create an equitable society, other entities participated in the viral hashtag solely to retain their social media clout and forestall criticism.

#BlackOutTuesday provides an extreme worst-case scenario of how insincere performances of grief can interfere with genuine grieving processes. For instance, as many companies with anti- black histories such as Fashion Nova posted #BlackOutTuesday, they often did so under Black

Lives Matter related hashtags. This caused the Twitter feeds that were normally dedicated to sharing information about protests and other grieving processes to be clogged with Black

Squares for days after the event.

Twitter can be an essential space for social and political organizing if used in effective ways. While #BlackOutTuesday was a largely ineffective tool of Twitter organizing, tweeting posts that channel grief after an instance of police brutality proved to be a beneficial tool in mobilization. For example, due to pressures that were largely organized on social media after the deaths of Taylor and Floyd, the United States has made a few strides in the right direction.

Though the cops that killed Taylor were not held accountable for her death, Kentucky banned

“no-knock” warrants to limit police brutality against Black and Latino communities (Mitchell

2020). Also, many other states have banned the use of chokeholds in response to the outcry after

Floyd’s death. Finally, another significant development since I began my research is the trial of

Derek Chauvin. Starting March 29 and expecting to end sometime in April, the State of

Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin, has the potential to be a landmark case in interactions

37 between police and nonwhite people. While many trials in the past have sided with nonblack police like Daniel Pantaleo and other law enforcement and even vigilantes such as George

Zimmerman, Derek Chauvin’s trial has the potential to change this trend. If held accountable for the death of George Floyd, Chauvin’s case could set an example to other nonblack law enforcement officers that racism and police brutality will no longer be tolerated. Though it is unclear at this point whether Chauvin’s trial will provide justice for George Floyd, we would not be asking these questions today if it were not for mobilization efforts both on and offline.

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